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GUY MADDIN / JEANNE MADIC

( This is Shalini Sharma in a collage made by Guy Maddin’s talented set designer / art director Galen Johnson for his ” Spiritismes ” shooting project at the Pompidou Center, Paris, 2012).

I have started a collaboration with one of my favourite filmdirectors, dreamy Canadian / Icelandic Guy Maddin on his beautiful and vast project named ” HAUNTINGS “. His idea is to shoot his own versions of about 200 lost, aborted or unrealized films, in his own words: ” films with no known final resting place, the unhappy narratives doomed to wander the landscape of film history “. Films – by famous directors like Hitchcock, Jean Vigo, Cocteau etc .. and more osbcure ones – that never made it to the screen because of various reasons: some never shot, some got burnt, some lost in the Post, or other badly stored … or just because a film storage space needed some room on their shelves! For years Guy has been collecting in library books and old Variety magazines synopses, critiques and other filmmaker’s notes about these mysterious unseen movies and decided to recreate them, shoot a 5 min. film, in his recognizable style, from what he knows from each of them. All of these short films – which shooting was funded by the Toronto International Film Festival – ” shall end up in a super-complicated website that recombines all these recreated films in a big spooky seance mash-up “. ( Guy’s own words … )

Guy was here in Paris not so long ago ( Feb-March 2012 ) to shoot 17 short films in 17 days at the Pompidou Center in Paris. This part of the shooting was called ” Spiritismes “, and the public of the museum could watch the whole shooting as it was in the lobby, so it was very much also like a Happening. People took a lot of pictures, some filmed when Guy was filming, too. Amongst others here were the actors involved: Mathieu Amalric, Rudy Andriamimarinosy, Jacques Bonnaffé, Amira Casar, Géraldine Chaplin, Miguel Cueva, Mathieu Demy, Jeanne de France, Victoire du Bois, Adèle Haenel, Udo Kier, Ariane Labed, Elina Löwensohn, Maria de Medeiros, Kim Morgan, Jacques Nolot, Christophe Paou, Jean-Baptiste Phou, Charlotte Rampling, Jean-François Stévenin, Robinson Stévenin, Luce Vigo, André Wilms.

This time I have been working with him as a props hunter for this Parisian part of his project …

Some of my family most treasured objects from Brittany ended up being used in the different shootings this time, including my great-grandmother’s bassinet ( which was also my grandma’s , my dad’s and mine! ), a hand embellished photo of my dear dead father as a 3 yrs old boy with his two sisters, my great grandmother’s oil lamp and tin boxes, etc … but also hand-picked objects and pictures that are normally in my apartment in Aubervilliers … so it was a bit like moving my home to the Pompidou ! Guy ‘s world and mine share so much in common, it felt pretty natural .

My father Charles Madic in the 1940’s, with his two sisters Annie and Henriette.